It's amazing what you learn reading MSDN. It has recently been my joy to have to discover everything I've never really wanted to know about the internal system tables of SQL Server 2005. I don't mean those lovely system views that they've created. I mean all the grubby nasty little tables with names like sys.objects$ and sys.syssingleobjrefs. To do this you require a dedicated admin connection (DAC) to the sql server instance that you want to investigate.

Initially I was looking at the tables via the command line sqlcmd -A, this was all good clean fun but not brilliant for having a good look at the data. So I went googling and discovered a neat little trick for getting the DAC open in SQL Manglement Studio. It goes something like this...

Simply prefix the connection of a query window with the string "admin:" - yes as simple as that, so in my case the server I was connecting to was "admin:richard\sql2005". A simple trick but well worth knowing, so now I can go back to looking at all these strange tables Microsoft never intended mere mortals to investigate.

Wish me luck, if I'm not back in 7 days send a search party.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178068.aspx